Born, at Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, 31 Dec. 1830. Worked for some years in a lace factory in Glasgow. Contrib. verses to the “Glasgow Citizen,” 1850. Sec. to Edinburgh Univ., 1854–67. Married Flora MacDonald, 1857. Contributor to “Encyclopædia Brit.,” “National Mag.,” “Macmillan’s Mag.,” “The Quiver,” and other periodicals. Died, at Wardie, near Edinburgh, 5 Jan. 1867. Works: “A Life-Drama,” 1852; “Poems,” 1853 (2nd edn. same year); “Sonnets on the War” (with Sydney Dobell), 1855; “City Poems,” 1857; “Edwin of Deira,” 1861; “Dreamthorp,” 1863; “A Summer in Skye” (2 vols.), 1865; “Alfred Hagart’s Household,” 1866; “Miss Oona McQuarrie,” 1866. Posthumous: “Last Leaves,” ed. by P. P. Alexander, with memoir, 1868. He edited: Burns’ Poetical Works, 1865; J. W. S. Hows’ “Golden Leaves from the American Poets,” 1866.

Personal

  Attention to duty was one of his noblest characteristics. Though largely endowed with the poetic sensitiveness and imagination, he was as careful, honest, and industrious, in the discharge of whatever task-work he had to do, as the most prosaic of men could be. Considering the brilliance of this literary avatar, and the flattering testimonies that greeted his reception into the high circle of poets, his unaffected humility was not less rare and beautiful. All the pæans of his admirers had no effect whatever in disturbing the serene balance of his nature, resting as it did on a solid basis of common sense. No ambitious dreams ever shook his faith in honest work, as the lot of every man, poet or clown, and the ultimate test of his worth. In this respect his life and character are full of instruction to young literary aspirants, especially those who believe themselves poets, with a special mission to sing, and that only…. Of all the men whom I have known that drew forth love as well as admiration, Alexander Smith was the most lovable. It was impossible not to love him, as impossible as it was to provoke him to do or say anything mean or unkind. Unlike many, whose whole goodness and fine sentiment is put into their hooks, his life and character were as beautiful as anything he wrote. The modesty of many men is but another form of pride: it was not so with him. He knew that he was gifted above his fellows, but he neither felt nor showed the pride of superiority, nor ever dreamed that he was privileged in any way, or absolved from the common work and duties of humanity. He was exquisitively sensitive, but as free from irritability as it is possible for a poet to be.

  His noblest monument is that which he himself erected—his life. Seldom if ever, indeed, has one so eminently gifted with a poetic temperament and genius, manifested such self-government, or lived a life so well balanced, beautiful, and blameless. That life is the best lesson he has taught us. It is a valuable legacy to all, but especially to aspiring young men and all candidates in literature.

  As a matter of fact, Alexander Smith was one of the most modest of men. The appearance of his “Life Drama” had evoked a tumult of acclaim sufficient to have turned the heads of most men of his age; a pattern-drawer at some commercial house in Glasgow, he awoke one morning to find himself the most bepraised of poets; but it altered his simple character not one whit; and when the pendulum swung the other way, he took detraction with the same good-natured philosophy. “At the worst,” he said, quoting from his own poem, “it’s only a ginger-beer bottle burst.” The epithet “spasmodic,” so freely applied to him by the critics of the day, was singularly out of place; he was full of quiet common sense, mingled with a certain Lamb-like humour. In these respects, though of a widely different character, he resembled another Edinburgh notoriety of that day, the gentle and hospitable Dean Ramsay.

A Life Drama, 1852

  We rejoice to learn that he is no improvisatore in composition; that he loves to write slowly; that he enjoys the labor of the file; that almost every line in his “Life Drama” was written several times—rejoice in this, because it assures us that his next work shall be no hasty effusion, patched up by the heat of success, but that it shall be a calm and determined trial of his general and artistic strength.

  He speaks well,—without exaggeration or bombast; like a highly cultivated Englishman, to say the least. The man who wrote these poems is fluent, even eloquent; he has a happy knack of expressing himself; many of his brief sayings are pregnant and Shakspearian; that judgment all men of common candour, and who are not soured by professional jealousy must pronounce. And that he is more, his noble idealization of Glasgow, throughout which there is no effort, no strain, though it moves in lofty numbers and at a difficult altitude, is sufficient in itself, we think, to prove. No man except a born poet could have written that poem. No amount of mere literary cultivation could have succeeded. We do not speak of the workmanship; it is, no doubt, cleanly cut, finely chiselled; but these are things that labour, without genius, may accomplish; it is the imaginative fire which lights up that vast throng of gloomy and swarthy faces, and melts them into one towering form of woe and pain, like the lurid figure of the Destroyer, with his whetted sword hanging over the accursed city, in Lorenzo’s picture, that indicates the poet, and the poet alone.

  It is admitted by most who are familiar with the poetry of Alexander Smith that in the art and beauty of modulation, his untrained imagination was lacking in sure and effective balance, and that he, himself, felt keenly this blemish; these faulty, half utterances hindered and fettered his spirit…. If it were immaturity only with Alexander Smith, his early volume, entitled “A Life Drama and Other Poems,” exhibited this, indeed, both in thought and art, but it exhibited more: there was a vagrant abandon of expression in his poetry, a persistent extravagance in the heedless huddling of thoughts and fancies, that could not have failed, as it did not, to challenge the critical and public taste, especially at a time when the exquisite lyrics of Tennyson, and his perfect idyls, like a magic flute, had captivated the poetic ear of the reading world; such tones as these, rendered so long, and without rival, made the minor songsters self-distrustful and chary.

  A poem not without considerable merit, but steeped in the purple and gold of poetical metaphor and simile.

Dreamthorp, 1863

  In 1863 appeared “Dreamthorp,” published by Strahan, a collection of Essays, for the most part new. This volume alone would entitle Smith to a place among the best writers of English prose. It was well received; but will probably be more read and admired now that he is dead. Many things seem less weighty and admirable from the lips of a living man, especially a young man, than they do afterwards, when he has joined the immortals, and will speak to us no more. Some of the essays in this volume are worthy of comparison with those of our most classical authors. The “Lark’s Flight” might have been owned by De Quincey, and “Dreamthorp” by Washington Irving.

  His chief prose work is “Dreamthorp,” a volume of essays having few equals in the English language. In it he celebrates the praises of the country, as in his poems he had done those of the town. It is by this volume that he will live longest as an exquisite prose writer, and on it his fame in that department of literature will mainly depend. It gained for him the name of Essayist.

General

  An extraordinary faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character.

  Alexander Smith I know by copious extracts in reviews, and by some MSS. once sent to us by friends and readers. Judging from those he must be set down as a true poet in opulence of imagery, but defective, so far (he is said to be very young) in the intellectual part of poetry. His images are flowers thrown to him by the gods, beautiful and fragrant, but having no root either in Enna or Olympus. There’s no unity and holding together, no reality properly so called, no thinking of any kind. I hear that Alfred Tennyson says of him: “He has fancy without imagination.” Still, it is difficult to say at the dawn what may be written at noon. Certainly he is very rich and full of colour; nothing is more surprising to me than his favourable reception with the critics. I should have thought that his very merits would be against him.

  The models whom this young poet has followed have been, it would appear, predominantly, if not exclusively, the writers of his own immediate time, plus Shakspeare. The antecedents of the “Life-Drama,” the one long poem which occupies almost the whole of his volume are to be found in the “Princess,” in parts of Mrs. Browning, in the love of Keats, and the habit of Shakspeare. There is no Pope, or Dryden, or even Milton; no Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of. We have before us, we may say, the latest disciple of the school of Keats, who was indeed no well of English undefiled, though doubtless the fountain-head of a true poetic stream. Alexander Smith is young enough to free himself from his present manner, which does not seem his simple and natural own. He has given us, so to say, his Endymion; it is certainly as imperfect, and as mere a promise of something wholly different, as was that of the master he has followed…. Alexander Smith lies open to much graver critical carping. He writes, it would almost seem, under the impression that the one business of the poet is to coin metaphors and similes. He tells them out as a clerk might sovereigns at the Bank of England.

  Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the object of our reproaches: but Mr. Alexander Smith’s models and flatterers. Against him we have nothing whatsoever to say; for him, very much indeed. Very young, as is said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen the sky, the sun and moon—and, moreover, the sea, report says, for one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his experience in natural objects. And he has felt, too painfully for his peace of mind, the contrast between his environment and that of others—his means of culture and that of others—and, still more painfully, the contrast between his environment and culture, and that sense of beauty and power of melody which he does not deny that he has found in himself, and which no one can deny who reads his poems fairly…. Mr. Smith does succeed, not in copying one poet, but in copying all, and very often in improving on his models. Of the many conceits which he has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, there is hardly one which he has not made more true, more pointed and more sweet; nay, in one or two places, he has dared to mend John Keats himself. But his whole merit is by no means confined to the faculty of imitation. Though the “Life Drama” itself is the merest cento of reflections and images, without coherence or organization, dramatic or logical, yet single scenes, like that with the peasant and that with the fallen outcast, have firm self-consistency and clearness of conception; and these, as a natural consequence, are comparatively free from those tawdry spangles which deface the greater part of the poem.

  It is what the first work of a very young and very genuine poet is most likely to be, the exuberant expression of his passionate delight in the spectacle and the suggestion of nature…. We are not struck by any want of thought in this poetry. It is so evidently the first run of the self-pressed fruit, that we expect to find it honey-like and almost cloying. It is so satisfactory and natural in its kind, that we feel no right to challenge it, nor complain that it is not something else and greater. Can any higher evidence be adduced of the universal impression of its genuineness, than its immediate reference by the critics to the loftiest standard? Critics assert that Alexander Smith has not yet grappled with the realities of life, and that his experience has been thus far thin and superficial—that they find no penetrating sadness in his music, and do not rise from it chastened and bettered. But of the June roses that are just falling, did they ask more than roses? or of the May-blossoming trees the fruit that only autumn ripens?

  Smith’s distinguishing characteristic is wealth of imagery, and a markedly youthful over-richness of language. “You scarce can see the grass for flowers.” He did much to conquer his besetting fault, and to gain simplicity; but not with complete success. His tendency is to string fancies on a thread of thought too thin for the weight it bears. The sense is oppressed as with kaleidoscopic colours, and the main lines of plan are too little defined. In separate passages you meet with promise of strength, dramatic insight, and self-mastery; and in a few of his shorter poems,—“Glasgow,” for example—he is strong; but even in “Edwin of Deira,” his last large poetic work, and by far the most compacted, there are loose threads, evidences that the material has not been completely assimilated and mastered. Crude passages alternate with strong ones. You feel that the thing, as a whole, has not been fused and shapen glowing; but rather put together bit by bit, and with too much exercise of conscious ingenuity in spite of wealth of imagery, and the warmth and glow of separate parts.

  He contributed to periodicals essays of sterling merit. He wrote a tale, partly autobiographical, and above all, “A Summer in Skye,” the picturesqueness and poetry of which have sent many a Southron as well as many a Scotchman to contemplate the savage grandeur of the misty Cuchullins.

  A poet deeply unknown to the present generation, but then acclaimed immortal by all the critics, and put with Shakespeare, who must be a good deal astonished from time to time in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon him. I read this now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved of him by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his “Life-Drama” by heart, and I can still repeat several gorgeous passages from it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the sole critic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun in Graham’s Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphian species. I cannot tell how I came out of this craze, but neither could any of the critics who led me into it, I dare say. The reading world is very susceptible of such lunacies, and all that can be said is that at a given time it was time for criticism to go mad over a poet who was neither better nor worse than many another third-rate poet apotheosized before and since. What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of the poets who had a vital heat in them; and it was by mere chance that I bathed myself in his second-hand effulgence.

  The present generation, which has been unjust to Dobell, has dealt still more hardly with Alexander Smith. The Nemesis of excessive praise is unjust depreciation, and both have been Smith’s lot. He has been denied the title of poet altogether; but he is a poet, and even a considerable one. He shares both the defects and the excellences of Dobell, never sinking so low, and, on the other hand, never rising as high. His execution is unequal, he rants, he uses metaphor to excess, he is by no means free from affectation. But though the “Life Drama” is crude and unequal, there is plenty of promise in it. There was ground to hope that the spirit from which it proceeded was like a turbid torrent which would by-and-by deposit its mud and flow on strong and clear. To those who hoped thus “Edwin of Deira” was disappointing. A good deal of the mud had been deposited, the execution was more perfect, but there was less strength and less volume of thought than might have been expected. It is in his minor pieces and in occasional lines and passages that Smith shows best.

  There are periods in the history of all the arts when the public seems to tire for a while of its old and well-established favourites, and to seek perversely enough for some one to supplant them; and during the interval between “Maud” and “Idylls of the King,” Alexander Smith stood in much the same relation to Tennyson as “Master” Betty stood at an earlier date to John Kemble. He was the “young Roscius” of poetry, who, after being temporarily elevated to the same, if not to a higher, pedestal than that of its greatest living master, is now as clean forgotten as his dramatic prototype.

  In “Edwin of Deira,” Smith writes an attractive and spirited poem, exhibiting commendable self-restraint and a chastened method. Unfortunately, the poem challenged attention almost simultaneously with Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” and it is surprising that, under such a disadvantage, it reached a second edition in a few months. Still, Smith did not escape the old charge of plagiarism and imitation. He was even blamed for utilising Tennyson’s latest work, though his poem was mainly, if not entirely, written before the “Idylls” appeared. Envious comparisons thus instituted were inevitably detrimental, and a fine poem has probably never received its due.